Since the stream of news is still pretty much dry, I figured I'd throw in something I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, but really didn't dare to: KDE4's performance. Since experiences with KDE4 seem to widely differ between people, it might be a good idea if we, together, can find a common cause among those of us having problems.

get some graphics hardware that has usable drivers... i run kde4 with both intel and nvidia, and ond intel it works fast, the same cannot be said for nvidia crap

Bullshit alert.

You really want the nvidia binary drivers (and nvidia card).

I even specced my next laptop (dell precision M2400) by the merit that it has nvidia quadro. You may go all touchy-feely about open source merits of ati/intel, but in the end of the day you want nvidia because it's the only one that gets the job done today (in case you want a working system now, not by next christmas if you build X from git).

"get some graphics hardware that has usable drivers... i run kde4 with both intel and nvidia, and ond intel it works fast, the same cannot be said for nvidia crap

Bullshit alert.

You really want the nvidia binary drivers (and nvidia card).

I even specced my next laptop (dell precision M2400) by the merit that it has nvidia quadro. You may go all touchy-feely about open source merits of ati/intel, but in the end of the day you want nvidia because it's the only one that gets the job done today (in case you want a working system now, not by next christmas if you build X from git).

Much, much better than any binary blob driver. Regardless of performance (which BTW seems pretty good for such a new driver), the fact that it is open source means (1) developers can fix it, and (2) since it is part of the kernel, it is automatically correct for the kernel. Sweet.

Nothing touchy-feely about this at all, the open source drivers are a definite win-win for both users and ATI.

Don't you think it's a problem that KDE essentially requires one particular brand of graphics card and a fancy model as well, just to run smoothly? For all the flack Vista got, it would actually run smoothly and correctly on a range of hardware (although not as big as range as XP). There's no reason why desktop effects should require a gaming rig, except that the KDE programmers suck. Compiz got it figured out, KDE and Qt still refuse to.

I even specced my next laptop (dell precision M2400) by the merit that it has nvidia quadro. You may go all touchy-feely about open source merits of ati/intel, but in the end of the day you want nvidia because it's the only one that gets the job done today (in case you want a working system now, not by next christmas if you build X from git).

It's bit of a shame, really.

No, really. I don't want binary garbage or anything from NVIDIA at all. It completely fails to get the job done.

As a user of the current git version of the FOSS radeon driver, I can say categorically that it has *plenty* of merits, and none of them have anything to do with 'touchy-feely'. Its all about features & performance.

but in the end of the day you want nvidia

And as a former Nvidia customer whose card got EOLed out of their main driver, I can also say: 'Been there, done that, no thanks.'

As long as I have a choice, I'll go with the company that better supports, and integrates with, the OS that I use. And that is no longer Nvidia.